“Clean Pain vs. “dirty pain”

Many, if not most of you, have seen the videos of Renee Nicole Good’s murder by an ICE agent, heard reporters and law enforcement experts dissecting the events, and heard from politicians on both sides of the aisle. There is much more to be said about this incident, but my focus in this post is to look at it from the perspective of trauma.

So much of my work, and the work of so many other therapists I know who specialize in trauma resolution, is about helping people release their trauma, and teaching them skills to settle their nervous system. 

Those skills are teachable. 

And with practice and with a lot of therapeutic work and a supportive community, people CAN learn how to let go of their trauma responses once they feel safe enough. They can live in a much more settled, calm body, which will allow them to live more peacefully and happily. 

But how do we teach people to settle their nervous systems when day in and day out, there is trauma after trauma after trauma happening in our cities, our states, our country and all around the world? 

It’s nearly impossible to feel settled these days. It just is. 

I have been in therapy and/or recovery meetings on a consistent basis for over 33 years. I have a lot of letters behind my name that reflect a ton of training that I’ve done over the years in trauma resolution, not to mention the thousands of hours I have worked with people in group, couples and individual sessions. And in the past two weeks, I felt the somatic repercussions of the cruelty and violence going on in this country, and around the world, in ways I don’t usually. 

I’m not someone who typically suffers from nausea, or who gets headaches. Since Good’s murder, I have had both. I’ve had a hard time falling asleep many nights, and I have had to turn on the TV to watch what I would call a “comfort show” a couple of nights, just to quiet my mind enough to get some rest. And the irony is that when I woke up the next day, I was still tired.

I think you’d have to be a monk living in a monastery, with no access to the news, and no outside influences coming at you in order to feel a sense of peace right now. 

Things are so bad that monks have left their monastery

As a result of all the unrest in this country, a group of Buddhist monks have been on a “Walk for Peace,” traveling from Fort Worth, Texas to Washington DC, on a peace mission, which has been a poultice of love on my heart for the last few weeks. 

I could choke up and cry about it as I’m writing this. To watch these men just quietly walking, being greeted by thousands upon thousands of people on the side of the road has felt like such an important message of hope.

You can follow them on Instagram and Facebook (their account is called Walk For Peace), and their dog Aloka (who actually has his own Instagram account now) has been walking with them. Sadly, Aloka had to have surgery last week, but he is on the mend.

Their Instagram account now has over a million subscribers, which tells me how deeply people are seeking peace, and hope, and kindness right now.

There’s nothing wrong with you

It’s important that I name, as a therapist, what it’s been like for me and for a lot of people I know right now, because at times like this, people feel like they’re doing something wrong when they don’t feel better, or when they’ve made progress and then they feel like they’re sliding back into old patterns. When they’re feeling anxious or depressed, or they can’t sleep, or they have little or no patience and a short fuse: They feel like they’re doing something wrong, or that there’s something inherently wrong with them. There IS something inherently wrong. We are living in a time where violence, cruelty and sadism are the norm, and not the exception.

And we’re seeing it broadcast in front of our eyes on a daily basis. Our bodies were not designed to take in this much danger and violence. 

When Renee Nicole Goode was asked to move her car by an ICE agent, she responded, “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.

Those turned out to be her last words. And after Ross fired the shots into Good’s car, killing her, he was heard on tape saying, “Fucking bitch.”

This is not normal. And it’s not normal for you to be exposed to this. And it’s REALLYnormal to not be okay under the circumstances.

I Don’t Understand How Someone Could Do That

Many people, myself included, have been stunned by the cavalier way that Ross walked away from the shooting, after that, without checking on Good. And how when a man said moments later, “I’m a physician,” as he was asking permission from ICE agents to go check her for a pulse, was told “I don’t care,” by one of the agents. It’s inhumane. Period.

Unhealed trauma survivors harm others. They operate from a place of what in Somatic Experiencing®, we call Global High Intensity Activation, which is a somatic state of having your foot on both the gas and the brakes at the same time.

You are in a freeze response, but your engine inside is revving at the same time. So from the outside, it looks like everything is okay, but inside, you’re agitated; you feel like everything is a danger, everything is a threat, and you are in strike mode in a nano-second. 

And when people are in that place, they will often inflict what therapist, author, and Somatic Experiencing® Practitioner Resmaa Menakem calls “dirty pain” – the unhealed pain from others – and from our collective history – that others have refused to heal. Things like racism, misogyny, homophobia, and white supremacy all get passed along, until someone has the courage to do their work. And because these guys haven’t done that work, they pass along that “dirty pain” onto others, doing enormous damage. 

The only way that someone can be committing these kinds of atrocities is if they are completely disconnected from a sense of empathy and a sense of humanity, or if a hatred of a certain class of people, or race, or religious group, or gender, etc has been passed along to them, and they haven’t examined that belief system, but rather, have perpetuated it. A lack of empathy and humanity is what is called being psychopathic.

It’s a clear indication that someone is dissociated and has a history of trauma. Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who killed Renee Nicole Goode had been involved in another incident with a car months before this happened. And he sustained a significant injury as a result. He should never have been allowed to be out on the street interacting with the public after an incident like that, without extensive somatic therapy to heal his Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). Because when people have PTSD, they don’t act, they react.

They are operating from a place of what we call defensive orienting, meaning they are looking for, and likely expecting danger. They will see danger, even when it doesn’t exist, because that’s how their nervous system has been wired. Their response to a perceived threat can be sparked in an instant, it overtakes their body and mind, and they react without the capacity to pause for a moment, to assess if there is actual danger. 

The brain gets hijacked

And when that happens, they can’t think straight. They are reacting purely from a survival perspective. First responders experience trauma on a regular basis, especially law enforcement professionals. And until there is a requirement for those first responders who have been involved in incidents – like Ross was months ago – to do extensive therapy for PTSD before they are allowed to have a firearm in their hands again, then innocent people are going to continue to die.

I do NOT excuse Ross’s behavior at all, but I do know how trauma responses work. 

I don’t know anyone who has not inherited some “dirty pain” from their lineage. I just don’t.

And so I want to borrow from the brilliant author Isabel Wilkerson’s metaphor about living with an old house. She talks about it from a perspective of American racism: I want to talk about it from a perspective of trauma.

And if you’ve never read anything by her, she wrote the book Caste, and she wrote the book The Warmth of Other Suns. I strongly recommend her writing.

But when I think about the old house that I inherited, I did not build the house. I did not create the problems in the electrical or the plumbing or the foundation. But it is my responsibility to upkeep that house; to replace things when they fall apart; to make a choice to upgrade them because they no longer work and they’ve actually been failing for quite some time.

“Clean Pain” vs. “Dirty Pain”

And so I can continue to live with that “dirty pain” and pass it down to the people around me and the next generations, or I can step into what Menakem calls “clean pain,” which is the pain that I experience when I walk through process of healing my trauma.

The discomfort; the overwhelming feelings; the memories; a sense of powerlessness; the hurt; the fear, and all that goes along with revisiting and healing of what happened to me. Repairing that old house requires all of that so that I can clear it out of my body, and do the Somatic Renovation,™️ and live differently moving forward. 

So my invitation to you is think about how you’re still living in the old house of heal the“dirty pain” that was given to you, and how you can do the necessary repairs – a little at a time – to process the “clean pain,” and move through towards freedom.

And in the meantime, stick close to your community, and practice grounding and calming exercises.

Easy does it, my friends.

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About Jean:

Jean Campbell, LCSW, SEP, TTP, TEP has been bringing together groups of people to heal for over 30 years. She blends her extensive experience in psychodrama, sociometry, group psychotherapy, somatic healing and trauma resolution to offer training for helping professionals, personalized intensives, clinical consultation, and trial preparation consultation. You can find her at theactioninstitute.com, on Instagram at @actioninstitute, and on Facebook at @actioninstituteofcalifornia.